Gobineau invented racism by projecting his caste’s decline onto civilization’s fate.

Evidence

Step by step, he identified the fall of his caste with the fall of France, then of Western civilization, and then of the whole of mankind. Thus he made that discovery, for which he was so much admired by later writers and biographers, that the fall of civilizations is due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood. This implies that in every mixture the lower race is always dominant. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 460

Categorization

• XREF: Core genetic fallacy that later racial ‘science’ builds on — connect to how the Islamophobia field treats racialized ‘blood’ discourse as a pseudo-naturalization of social hierarchy.
• DEFINE: Defines the founding mechanism of racializing logic: caste decline → race degeneration → blood mixing, with the lower race always dominant.